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1. Introduction
Labor mobility in the USA is higher than in most other developed countries; according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an American moves jobs 12 times during his or her life and stays four years with one employer (Mosley, 2015; Ewing et al., 2002). Although a dynamic labor market can lead to a more efficient use of human resources in sectors that need more readily available skills, labor mobility is a concern particularly for Information Technology (IT) and IT-enabled firms that rely on highly skilled individuals and where workforce mobility results in increased costs of hiring, training and developing employees (Dabirian et al., 2019). Firms are constantly looking for effective strategies to attract and recruit new talent while putting in place practices to ensure that their current employees do not leave for employment opportunities with other firms. One of those strategies is commonly referred to as employer branding (Ambler and Barrow, 1996). An employer brand is the image that current, past and future employees share of an organization’s attractiveness as a place to work (Wilden et al., 2010). As this shared image strongly influences the firm’s ability to retain current employees and to attract new talent, it is one of the most valuable assets of the company (Dabirian et al., 2017). The underlying premise of employer branding is its focus on employees as human capital, which alongside other capitals (e.g. social, structural, intellectual) (Archer-Brown and Kietzmann, 2018; Robson and Sekhon, 2016) enhances a firm’s performance and gives it a competitive advantage in the market (Barney, 1991; Barney et al., 2001; Backhaus and Tikoo, 2004).
Employer branding matters in Business to Consumer (B2C) firms and in the decision-making process (Webster and Keller, 2004) in the Business to Business (B2B) context. In B2B relationships, it is the employees that carry the company brand (Gupta et al., 2010a; Gupta et al., 2010b) and communicate it to their customers (Leek and Christodoulides, 2011), which is also seen as a catalyst to improve overall productivity (Chunping and Xi, 2011). In B2C, especially in retail, customer-perceived service quality completely mediates the relationship between employee job satisfaction and customer satisfaction (Brown and Lam, 2008). Interestingly, the effect of employee engagement on performance is...